Strangely though, I feel obliged to tell them I gave up, to explain that the FaultTolerantEngine? isn't going to just fix itself by magic any more.

The irony is that They don't understand what has been stopped. I can't explain what I'm not doing anymore, or how the part of my mind that was AlwaysOnTheJob? (the UngarMethod) has turned its back on Them, even turned against them. Maybe if They understood, it wouldn't be like this.

Trying too hard to get the project into a better place you run into walls of red tape, egos, complacency, enough to drive anyone insane. The only solution when confronted with the "if it ain't broke" mentality is to just stop fixing anything at all - at that point you've stopped caring and you're well on the way to a BigBallOfMud. It happens in all parts of the system. Build systems that don't look anything like the project they're trying to build. The test systems sit on top that don't catch any bugs because the build system is nothing like the development environment leading to WorksForMe. Deployment systems that don't track the project end up turning into a DoUndoRedo where only 10% of the code is doing anything useful and the rest is just shuffling bytes into oblivion. Code that should take 30 seconds to build is taking 15 minutes because each source file IncludesKitchenSink and there's no dependency management.